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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
Very few female voices from the Middle Ages are audible today; most of the music, poetry, and other writings that survives reveals the creativity and expresses the attitudes of men. This course will explore the experiences and viewpoints of medieval women through the lens of the poetry and songs of two exceptional 12th-century figures: the German abbess Hildegard of Bingen, whose long and immensely productive life was shaped by the requirements of monastic culture; and the French Countess of Dia in Provence, whose elusive life and works exemplify the dynamics of aristocratic court culture. We will ask how these and other musical women active in both the sacred and the secular spheres (such as the nun Birgitta of Sweden, and Queen Blanche of Castile) negotiated their places and made their voices heard within the patriarchal society of their time. We will examine the ways in which these contrasting environments informed the different outlooks, ideas, and aesthetics expressed in the words and music of their songs. Along the way we will critically assess how these lost voices have been recreated to speak to us today through recordings and film.
Prerequisite:
Ability to read music useful but not required
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3.00 Credits
This discussion-based course examines various forms of sexual labor in order to better understand how gendered and sexual performances are used in a variety of cultures and contexts for material benefit. We begin with the 1980s Feminist Sex Wars, a series of debates among feminist activists and scholars about pornography, prostitution, queerness, and issues of sexuality and power. The majority of the course, however, is a global and ethnographic exploration through cross-cultural case studies that includes "traditional" forms of sex work such as street prostitution, pornography, and escorting as well as sexual labor without contact such as stripping and phone sex. Finally, we will explore other examples of people who engage in sexualized gender performances in exchange for material benefit such as runway models, beauty pageant queens, and drag performers. Course readings come from a range of fields, but focus most heavily on cultural anthropology, feminist/queer ethnographies, and feminist theory. (Major authors include: Gayle Rubin, Don Kulick, Denise Brennan, Andrea Dworkin, and Catharine Mackinnon.) This course meets the requirements of the Exploring Diversity Initiative in that it focuses on empathetic understanding, power and privilege, and critical theorization, especially in relation class, gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity in both the US and global comparative contexts. A prominent feature of this course is that it includes opportunities to travel together to New York to attend events and meet with relevant interlocutors (e.g., tour modeling agencies, meet sex worker-rights NGOs).
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3.00 Credits
No course description available.
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3.00 Credits
In her essay "Peter's Pans: Eating in the Diaspora," literary critic Hortense Spillers argues that "[b]lack writers, whatever their location and by whatever projects and allegiances they are compelled, must retool the language(s) that they inherit" in order to express their experience of blackness. This course considers how this "retool[ing]" of language occurs in African Diasporic literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, and how new "language(s)" of literary form and genre impact black writers' representations of gender and sexuality. We will focus on writers and filmmakers such as Bessie Head, Zora Neale Hurston, Mariama Ba, W.E.B. Du Bois, Cheryl Dunye, Gwendolyn Brooks, Isaac Julien, Michelle Cliff, Sapphire, Lewis Nkosi, Junot Diaz, and others whose works destabilize conventions of genre, blurring the lines between fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction. We will examine these texts alongside theories of genre, gender and sexuality offered by Spillers, Michelle Wright, Cheryl Clarke, Judith Butler, Evie Shockley, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and others. Through these texts, we will consider how Afrodiasporic writers address questions of gender and sexual identity that arise at various moments in modern African diaspora history, and how "retool[ed]" languages of literature complicate global ideas about black gender and sexuality. This course meets the requirements of the Exploring Diversity Initiative in that it increases students' knowledge of the experiences of people disempowered on the bases of race, gender, and sexuality in a multinational context, and allows them to understand creative expression as a means of interrogating disempowering social structures and ideologies.
Prerequisite:
Some coursework in WGSS, AFR, ENGL or COMP
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3.00 Credits
This advanced seminar introduces students to queer of color critique, a mode of queer theory emphasizing diverse experiences, geographies, and epistemologies that also foregrounds the intersection of sexual and racial constructs. We will examine the history of this line of critique, exploring how and why it became a necessary intervention into the then still emerging field of queer studies. In addition to theoretical works, we also examine literary and cinematic works that exemplify and enact queer of color critique. We will read major works by those individuals who established the discipline, thereby surveying works from a variety of fields including critical race studies, literary theory, anthropology, feminist/womanist studies, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, area studies, and others. Much of this early work in queer of color critique is North American in context, but we will also explore more recent scholarship that deals with transnational contexts and applications and examine how queer of color critique contributed to the emergence of transnational queer studies. A key feature of this course will be its uniquely dialogic structure that will allow a variety of diverse authors and artists to appear virtually to answer questions about their published work as well as some emerging scholars in the field who will share their experiences finding their way into this area of study and how they developed research and artistic projects. This course meets the requirements of the Exploring Diversity Initiative in that it focuses on empathetic understanding, power and privilege, and critical theorization, especially in relation class, gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity in both the US and global comparative contexts.
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3.00 Credits
This course explores the constructions of feminine and masculine categories in modern Africa. We will concentrate on the particular history of women's experiences during the colonial and postcolonial periods. In addition, we will examine how the study of history and gender offers perspectives on contemporary women's issues such as female-circumcision, teen pregnancy, wife-beating, and "AIDS."
Prerequisite:
Open to first-year students with instructors permission
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3.00 Credits
To bring the all too familiar everyday to our attention, artists and writers have made it strange. What happens when we view everyday life from elsewhere? While everyday culture has often been experienced as repressive and alienating in modern Western societies, a new importance assigned to everyday life made it liberating in Japan during the twenties and in contemporary China. The contours of the everyday are delightfully vague, and it always exceeds theorizing. For instance, is its privileged place the street or the home? Is it lived largely in institutions that regulate our daily lives, or is it lived between and outside them? Everyday objects and commodities like the potato, the postcard, the car, clothes, housing, etc., will be analyzed. Fiction by Leo Tolstoy, Franz Kafka, Georges Perec, Manil Suri, Ha Jin, and Banana Yoshimoto. Films by Chantal Akerman, Pedro Almodovar, Benoit Jaquot, and Pierre Jeunet. Art projects that transform the everyday will also be discussed, including those of Sophie Calle, Mary Kelley, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Christine Hill. Short theoretical excerpts from Freud, Kracauer, Goffman, Lefebvre, de Beauvoir, Friedan, Debord, Foucault, and Bourdieu. All works not originally in English will be read in English translation.
Prerequisite:
One 200-level literature course
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3.00 Credits
For complex reasons, Shakespeare has always revealed as much about those who speculate on him as the speculators have revealed about him. In this course, we will engage a few plays in considerable depth: Merchant of Venice, King Lear or Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra. But we will also use these works as a means to engage some of the most compelling trends in recent critical thought, including cultural theory and post-Marxist analysis, political theology, deconstruction and rhetorical theory, psychoanalytic thought and theories of gender and sexuality. In some instances, we will look at applied criticism, in others we will simply place a theoretical work along side a play and see what they have to say to each other--what, for instance, would a Shakespearean reading of Jacques Lacan look like?
Prerequisite:
A 100-level English course, or a score of 5 on the Advanced Placement examination in English Literature or a 6 or 7 on the International Baccalaureate
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3.00 Credits
This lecture and discussion course focuses on the politics of personal style among U.S. women of color in an era of viral video clips, the 24-hour news cycle, and e-commerce sites dedicated to the dermatological concerns of "minority" females. With a comparative, transnational emphasis on the ways in which gender, sexuality, ethno-racial identity, and class inform standards of beauty, we will examine a variety of materials ranging from documentary films, commercial websites, poetry and sociological case studies to feminist theory. Departing from the assumption that personal aesthetics are intimately tied to issues of power and privilege, we will engage the following questions: What are the everyday functions of personal style among women of color? Is it feasible to assert that an easily identifiable "African-American," "Latina," or "Asian-American" female aesthetic exists? What role do transnational media play in the development and circulation of popular aesthetic forms? How might the belief in personal style as a tactic of resistance challenge traditional understandings of what it means to be a "feminist" in the first place? Readings include works by Julie Bettie, Rosalinda Fregoso, Tiffany M. Gill, Margaret L. Hunter, Linda Leung, Lisa Nakamura, Catherine Ramirez, Felicity Schaefer-Grabiel, and Sandra K. Soto, among others.
Prerequisite:
LATS 105, AFR 200, AMST 201, WGSS 101 or permission of the instructor
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3.00 Credits
This course explores developments in recent feminist thought influenced by philosophical currents in France and Germany (poststructuralism and critical theory.) Depending upon the year in which the course is offered, we explore topics such as self and society, sexual difference, embodiment, critiques of reason, the psyche, new materialist theories, queer feminism, and transnational feminism. We will read from works by authors such as the following; Sandra Bartky, Iris Young, Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, Luce Irigaray, Jessica Benjamin, Gayle Rubin, Rosi Braidotti, Eve Sedgwick, Lynne Huffer, Sara Ahmed, Jasbir Puar, and Wendy Brown. Fiction and film may also be included.
Prerequisite:
WGSS 101, and a second course in WGSS, or permission of instructor
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